Episode 75: Pivot Series, Part 3: Thriving in Uncertainty with John Shapiro
Melissa Perri welcomes John Shapiro to the third episode of this four-part miniseries about companies that successfully made major pivots during the pandemic. John is the Head of Product of Global Supplier at Wayfair. He manages a team of 60+ product managers, represents the company’s global suppliers, and ensures that products meet the standards of global consumers. Alex shares how Wayfair handled shifting from a heavily in-person culture to operating entirely online, how they rode an unexpected and sudden spike in business, how their long term vision and strategy kept them on course, how to keep a roadmap flexible even in an enterprise, managing employee burnout during the pandemic, and why they always come back to their customers’ problems above everything else.
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Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and John talk about:
John talks about his professional background, his current role in Wayfair, and his accomplishments at the company. [1:46]
John highlights the initial conversations and concerns Wayfair’s product leaders were having at the start of the pandemic and how they had to shift from having in-person meetings to building products. [3:50]
Like most companies during that time, Wayfair’s main concern was whether their revenue would plummet due to lockdown and restrictions. However, there was increased demand for home entertainment products along with a rise in e-commerce, so Wayfair found a way to survive. [6:19]
Wayfair had to be willing to alter its roadmap, even though it caused major revenue loss. John explains, “Our roadmaps are generally built out with problem statements and customer hypotheses… we try to focus on who the user is, what is the problem that they are encountering and how to solve it for them”. [13:00]
At Wayfair, product teams have biannual tactical meetings to discuss their strategies. They break down their long-term ideas into short-term hypotheses so they have an objective they can strive to accomplish. If it succeeds the teams get the okay to proceed with their related ventures. [15:21]
To have a successful product team, the team must be comfortable communicating with the leader. John suggests that you should deliver what your roadmap promised. Reiterating your ideas creates an environment that’s focused on solving a problem for the customer. [17:42]
Wayfair already had systems in place that helped suppliers get their products to market during the pandemic. They were able to continue to supply real-time data to help suppliers develop their businesses and determine what their consumers needed. [24:23]
Wayfair ensures that its product teams are as close to the consumer as possible; they ensure that the people designing their products understand their consumers’ needs. [25:23]
Product leaders must form relationships with potential suppliers, but that may be difficult to do remotely. John suggests turning on your camera while video calling your client because that allows them to connect with you and helps build trust [30:23]
Resources
John Shapiro on LinkedIn | Twitter
Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the product thinking podcast today. We're continuing on with our series all about pivots during COVID and we're joined by John Shapiro. Who's the head of product, uh, of global supplier at Wayfair. So welcome John.
John:
Thank you, Melissa. Thanks for having me.
Melissa:
Yeah. So can you tell everybody a little bit about you before we jump into your really exciting pivot story about how Wayfair, uh, kind of weathered the COVID storm and, and what happens next?
John:
Sure, absolutely. I, um, I was one of those kids who growing up knew exactly what I was going to major in when I went to college was gonna BCS because I'd been tinkering with computers ever since my dad brought home an IBM XT when I was like eight years old, I think it was the first computer with the hard drive of it. These days that might fit, you know, a photo or two, but, uh, you know, very quickly realized that what energized me most was deploying technology to solve customer problems rather than wrangling with those deep technical challenges myself. So after a brief stance at IBM and at Google as software engineer, I got my MBA and I embarked on what turned out to be, uh, primarily a product career. I had product roles across Adobe into it. And, uh, now Wayfair where I've built, uh, products and worked with teams to create experiences for consumers, creative professionals, small businesses, um, suppliers.
So really kind of the, you know, pretty broad spectrum of users that we've built out, uh, products for, and also pretty broad set of, uh, ex uh, kind of domain areas, things like FinTech, accounting, uh, creativity, and now eCommerce at Wayfair. I spent, uh, where I've been now been, sorry, I'm gonna try that again. I've now been at Wayfair, uh, a little over three and a half years, and I spent the first two and a half years on the customer side because Wayfair is a two sided platform. So on one side we have consumers and customers and businesses who purchase from Wayfair. And on the other side of the platform, we have the suppliers who create the products that customers buy. So the first two and a half years was building out various experiences for that shopping journey, things like our mobile app across iOS and Android, um, FinTech products, like by now pay later and our credit card offering AR VR capabilities, where you can take a 3d model, place that into your room, see how that fits and kind of get a good sense for that product. It's now been, it's now been about a year and a half where I've been leading the product team that builds the experiences for suppliers and, uh, helps them really take advantage of that platform and be able to sell to the millions of consumers who shop on way
Melissa:
50 ish product managers under you. Right.
John:
That's right. I have a team of about, uh, 62 product managers, um, recently kind of taking on and, uh, responsible for design as well. So about 60 designers who we partner with closely and, uh, and work with analysts and engineers to build out these experiences.
Melissa:
Cool. So that is like a massive team of product managers. And we're not even, we're only touching part of the business too at Wayfair. Um, but I just wanna set the tone for our listeners there. So we're talking about a really large company here. Um, I'm sure you've all ordered from Wayfair. If you were around the United States. I know I was on there all the time during COVID, uh, but John, tell us about, you know, 2020 March, 2020 things go into lockdown, you know, what's the conversation happening at Wayfair and, you know, what are you talking about as leaders there of the product managers?
John:
Yeah, so I would say there are really kind of two very related threats happening both kind of within the company and then in the broader environment. So within the company, I'll say Wayfair was a very in-person collaboration environment. We had two engineering locations, we had the global headquarters, which were in Boston and we had a, uh, site in Berlin as well, but in both those locations, it was very much, um, in office collaboration experiences and, and, you know, to the point where meetings didn't have Google meets, they didn't have WebEx links. It was, you know, it was expected that, you know, you're going to a meeting, you're going to the meeting. So the shift from that environment to essentially overnight on a, on a Thursday, kind of the, that week in March, and you know, that, that Thursday we did a trial run of, you know, could, could we even log in to our systems outside of the firewall and outside of the network had a, a lot of discussion of, do we go back that Friday because we had a two week, um, kind of at work at home planned.
Um, in retrospect, obviously, uh, very silly to have, uh, been all that worried about that one day, but, you know, tho those were the kinds of conversations that we're having of, you know, could we even build products without sitting next to each other in an environment that had not, uh, kind of built out the system and capabilities to, to do so. Uh, luckily we had, you know, introduced Google suite, uh, uh, you know, shortly before we were early adopters of Miro and, um, kind of a lot of the collaboration tools that we now use today. So it was a very in kind of looking back, it ended up being much more seamless than we had feared, but having product managers, engineers, designers, analysts, and then also all the customer support folks, customer service folks who are interacting with suppliers, interacting with our customers kind of shift from, in person to being remote overnight was a pretty big jolt to the system.
Uh, you know, personally I did not, um, I didn't even have a desk. So I, I spent the kind of time prior to joining Wayfair in the bay area and moved to Boston to, to join Wayfair. But, you know, like I mentioned, you know, I was not working from home. So, you know, would, would do my emails at night at the kitchen table, but very quickly realized that I should probably buy a desk. This is not just gonna be a couple weeks. And luckily I had a good place to, uh, to go buy it and, uh, and bought, bought myself a desk on Wayfair. I was gonna say,
Melissa:
You really buy the desk? You're like, no, actually i went somewhere else.
John:
no, I, uh, I definitely did. We have a, we have a nice employee discount. I certainly took advantage of that. The, the converse is, uh, kind of how we thought about and approached the broader business. It, at that point, it was a lot of uncertainty to the, you know, to the main question being, is our revenue gonna go to zero because lots of governments around the country and around the world were essentially shutting down and forcefully shutting down and locking down businesses. Um, thankfully both for ourselves and for the customers that we serve in almost, I believe it's every jurisdiction, eCommerce and eCommerce fulfillment was deemed an essential service, so we're able to continue to operate. So, um, that was kind of that first, first real big question of, um, you know, do we, do we need to go in hibernation? Are we going to be able to, to operate?
We then realized that people, you know, like, like me, people were realizing that their homes were not equipped to be schools, to be offices, to be playgrounds, to be entertainment for, you know, spending essentially, you know, in some cases up to 24 hours a day in, you know, kind of locked in or quasi locked into your home either by choice or by necessity. So there was a, a ton of demand that immediately spiked, um, around cus uh, customers needing to and wanting to go online purchase for their home, sort of in parallel, whe you know, beyond the necessities, it was also a bit of a shift where, um, people were not spending money on going out to eat on experiences on travel. So they had more dollars to spend and took on projects that they had put off. Or now that they were spending more time at home, realize maybe they didn't love their couch, or maybe they wanted to buy a new chair or kind of a new set of chairs for, for their dining set. So, um, it was this very, um, kind of both, you know, tumultuous and, uh, an exciting period at the same time.
Melissa:
Cool. So when you were observing all these regulations happening, um, you know, it's kind of like a wait and see at that point, but what were the conversations that you were having to figure out how to respond to those things? Like how did that impact your roadmap? How did that impact planning for your teams, um, and who really were involved with those, you know, those different conversations about what is our strategy? How do we go forward?
John:
Yeah, so I'd say there's probably a few areas. The vast majority of Wayfair's business is, uh, is online as e-commerce. So it's connecting the suppliers that we create exper for, to the customers that they wanna be able to sell to, and that we help them merchandise their, their products to. So I'll kind of come back in a second and talk about that set of roadmaps, cuz in, in many ways that did not change dramatically. We also had the delivery functions because for some of our suppliers, we also offer fulfillment services. So being able to navigate how do we actually deliver to customers front doors and prior to COVID, we would, uh, deliver into their homes. So that was going to be a set of experience that we had to change. And then finally we have a, uh, assembly platform. We call it home services, but essentially installation and assembly that professionals come into customer's homes and do that assembly and installation.
So in those latter two, it was a pretty big shift because we realized fairly quickly that regardless of what was happening, we were not going to be comfortable, um, sending people into other people's homes, uh, during that period of time. So we took a pause on both in-home delivery, as well as the assembly and the installation services and kind of took that time to pivot the teams, to focus on what was it going to take to restart safely things like safety protocols, things like being able to deliver P P P E to our pros, because if you remember back in March, April, May, 2020, it was actually quite hard to find gloves, to find masks, to find the basic equipment that our pros are going to need to be able to do their job safely once we did restart. So that, uh, was a fairly big shift.
In those cases. The roadmaps were really kind of driven by and determined by the teams. We work in a four in the box model, the function that I was kind of mentioning earlier, product design, engineering, analytics, really partnering closely to determine and figure out what, uh, what matters and, and what makes sense for us to focus on prioritize. So in those cases, you know, as always, and usually kind of driven and, and facilitated by the PM, but we had those conversations with the team level. at the same time we were having very senior exec level conversations because we were talking about pausing tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions, of dollars of, of revenue around these services. So, um, you know, we wanted to make sure that we were getting alignment up and down the organization and, you know, happy to say that there was very, you know, very little, essentially zero pushback to say, we shouldn't do the right thing for our customers.
We shouldn't be doing the right things for our pros, even though it meant increased short-term expenses, uh, kind in, uh, incurring revenue losses during that period of time then to, oh, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. To come back a little bit to the online side of our business, which was the vast majority of the revenue. There were a few trends that we actually had, uh, had hit on and were, were lucky. One is that we've been, you know, for the last 20 years, uh, Wayfair turns 20 years old this year. So, uh, for the last 20 years we've been building towards and continuing to help drive the shift from physical retail to online. And e-commerce so in many ways this was just a continuation of that shift. So in those, from that perspective, those teams roadmaps did not have to change too dramatically. Um, certainly continued to build on the acceleration that we were seeing from a, from a volume standpoint.
But, um, I think that actually kind of takes us to that second, uh, fortuitous point. We have gone through phases of growth at Wayfair, and we were actually kind of in that moment where we were really investing in retooling our platform to get us to that next wave of growth. It's one of those dynamics of working for a company that's been growing as quickly as wafer has, which is basically that things that worked for you in processes and systems that worked three 18 months ago are basically breaking today.
And you know, that the things that are working today are unlikely to be able to scale 18 months out. So we constantly have to balance building out new features and capabilities with investing in the broader platform and the systems. So we had actually just made a big shift of our storefront, which is what we call our customer experience into the cloud with Google cloud. Um, we were really investing around, uh, decoupling and kind of doing a lot of the, maybe less sexy things, but the really important things that proved out to, um, enable us to scale, um, substantially during covid and the volume spikes that we,
Melissa:
Yeah, it sounds like a testament to, you know, not having to throw out your whole roadmap, the way that you plan that strategy. Like looking ahead, it's not just keep doing what we're doing. It's not just doubled down on all these things, but it sounds like you were really looking a lot more forward in the market and trying to figure out what comes next, which still stayed true to who you were, even if there was a pandemic and you were going back to normal.
John:
Exactly. A lot of our focus is to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. So our roadmaps are generally built out with problem statements and customer hypotheses. It's, you know, while yeah, like kind of everyone we're gonna have some of the projects that we do on those lists as, as well, but as much as possible, we try to focus on who is the user, what is the problem that we, that they are encountering and how can we solve it for them in a way that is better than they thought possible. So that allowed us to have some of that flexibility around solutioning, meaning that we didn't have to go back and do, you know, big replanning activities or exercises. We could still focus on solving those same similar problems with different solutions or different projects or different capabilities.
Melissa:
I hate that. It's an awful way to do. I don't talk about it at all. Um, no, but I, I love that. It's a, it's, it's so flexible to do it that way too. Um, I'm curious, like, what's your, what was your process to, for evaluating some of those bigger problems? Like if, if something was on the roadmap during this time and it was, you know, a problem statement, but you found that problem has changed. What was your process for reevaluating that, and trying to figure out what to do next? Like what did your teams have to do and how they have to interact with you to do that as well?
John:
Yeah. So we try to have a bit of a hybrid approach around roadmap and around planning because of the scale of the organization. Um, I think what, what we've all seen is the, um, and I've, I've been in those, those meetings as well, not, not a Wayfair, I won't name where, where it was, but you kind of have a two day planning session where you literally break down every task into, you know, or every sprint into the tasks. You put the cards on the, on the bulletin board, you draw string between the dependencies. Um, that's the kind of, and you know, of course that lasts you, uh, three days post planning until someone shapes something changes. And then you have to throw that all out and try again. That's the very like bottoms down, super focused on dependency alignment, very rigid process. There's also the very fluid of like everyone just go do what you want.
And you can imagine that is chaotic even at smaller scales. And certainly wouldn't, uh, wouldn't work at, at somewhere like Wayfair. So what we try to do is, and you know, and kind of the analogies I I have around those two one is that it's a really big battleship that once you get going great, but man, I really hope you don't have to turn because it's gonna take you forever to turn. And the other one is the speed boats, all zipping around that there's, uh, activity, but there's not necessarily progress. And what we try to do is that we try to have a destination in mind. So across each of our organizations and I was at storefront at the time we have a, a vision that we set out, we use OKRs to kind of break that long term vision into the near term hypotheses that we have and objectives that we're trying to accomplish.
And then teams will go through and kind of mirror that same process. That if, if the process I describe happens at the organizational level, you then have teams that inherit some of those OKRs, uh, those objectives, but then also create their own that are tied to their charters and their missions. So the idea is that it's a kind of loosely coupled but aligned system. So kind of go back to that analogy you have, you know, we all know that we're heading to that island over there. We'll have a rough track that we're saying we're gonna go around those rocks and not try to sail through them. But then each of the sailboats is able to kind of chart their own path a little bit to, to get there. So to get very tactical and specific, there is a twice a year planning process that we run. We had, we were about halfway into one when, when COVID hit. So there was a lot of work in flight. And then, uh, in parallel, we had teams that were working through and kind of operating in more of that two weeks, uh, kind of iterated delivery type process, where they were doing both discovery and delivery at the same time.
Melissa:
I think there's a lot of teams that I've heard of that are afraid to go back to their leaders and be like, Hey, I don't think this should be on the roadmap, or we need to change these things, or we need to like, you know, open it up even when you have such a flexible system like that, which is great. Um, what's your recommendation to other leaders, right? To help make sure that their teams can communicate with them so that, you know, maybe, maybe the teams put it the right way to the leaders about how they need to change. What do you do in your team to make sure that people come to you with those ideas and make sure that they're not just holding them back and they actually go forward with them?
John:
Okay. So I found that there's really two kind of reasons that drive behavior like this meaning kind of two, two primary reasons that folks are afraid of speaking up. I think the first one is if you create an environment, if there's a cultural environment that it's about delivering what you promised and that your roadmap is that promise, then within the team, there will be hesitation to divert from that plan, cuz it'll be seen as, um, you know, taking a step backward or not meeting your commitment. And you know, in, in companies, large and small implications are negative performance reviews, career growth, reputational hits things, things like that. So the first thing I would recommend is ensuring that you invest in and repeat and say over and over cuz it's one of those things that you can't say too many times that, uh, that you create an environment where it's really about solving a problem for a customer, not delivering an item on, on roadmap, because then that creates that space.
That if that item on the roadmap is no longer the best thing to deliver to solve that problem for a customer or to deliver an outcome or a result for a business for the business, then you have that space to, to have that conversation. The second part is then kind of outside of that team, if a roadmap becomes a commitment and a promise or too much of a roadmap becomes that commitment to folks outside the team, then you have that same situation, but almost even magnified. And you know, the example that comes to mind is when I came over to the S fire side, you know, I was kind of mentioning that we had, uh, castle gate forwarding, uh, sorry. I mentioned that we have services. You now know it's called castle gate forwarding, where we are, um, able to offer that kind of container shipping for suppliers across the ocean from facilities, say in China to the us or whatever market they're selling in.
And one of the experiences that we're building out is how you enter an order for, for Wayfair to come and pick up a container as part of that, you need to say what's in the container and you know, you schedule it and you submit it and you, you know, then it gets picked up. You could go back to that order screen to check on the status of your container. But when you did, you could also edit the quantity of products within that container. And the question I had was, uh, you know, very facetiously, what a second, can we, he helicopter out extra couch? Can we go pick something up off of the, the ship midflight while it's on container? And obviously the answer is no. And the, um, the, the reason given for, you know, why it was shipped that way was, you know, we had promised this on a certain date, it was already late.
And the, you know, the, the, the team did not didn't wanna disappoint the stakeholder further or the business team further, I was waiting for this, but, you know, clearly ended up, uh, chipping something that, uh, was not the best outcome and the best result and kind of where we ended up shifting and kind of evolving the team's, um, kind of operating model to was kind of moving away from this, engaging at items on a roadmap, because that's the least useful way to partner or engage with, uh, business stakeholders or operational stakeholders in our case. And instead kind of move up to get more high level and focus on what are we trying to achieve. What's the business outcome that we're trying to get to, but then also moved down and instituted product reviews, uh, modeled after the, the Pixar Pixar brain trust model. But basically, I mean, you know, lots of companies have product reviews in this case.
We, um, brought in and made sure stakeholders were joining and participating because, you know, later on in having conversations with some of the kind of peer organizations on the op side, talking to our COO, you know, as I'd suspected, very obviously they were like, no, like if you told me that, that was the reason that we could ship, you know, we could ship now or we could wait two weeks and not have that kind of customer experience. Of course I would've said just wait and ship it. Right. But because there was not that sort of granularity of communication teams just had that fear that they were going to, um, be penalized or, or, or kind of complained about if they, if they didn't shift on that particular date.
Melissa:
Fascinating. I think that's very good advice. And I think you started talking about too, like, um, you know, part of the other thing that's probably impacting Wayfair, which is the, uh, supplier crisis, right? Not being able to get the furniture in trying to figure out how to ship it, how has that really affected Wayfair and, you know, especially cuz this is your arm of the business, um, you know, what were the types of pivots you had to make to in face of all that stuff?
John:
Yeah. I think the challenge there is that predictability went out the window in February, 2020. And in, you know, as much as we like to talk about on product, the product side of being agile, you know, reacting to what we learned from customers, this is, uh, you know, the, the digital products, the other product side of Wayfair, which is the, you know, physical products that we ship and sell are very longly time comparatively. So, you know, we might be talking 6, 9, 12 months from the point where a product is first conceived, ordered, manufactured, shipped, and then delivered to customers. So as you can imagine, having predictability around forecasts around sales is quite important to, uh, not having too much or too little inventory, cuz both are really problematic for a supplier. A supplier having too much inventory is tying up cash and, and tying up their cash flow.
And they might well go out of business if they're sitting on inventory that doesn't sell on the other hand, having too little inventory means missed opportunities that you're not able to capitalize on and sell to customers who are looking to buy your products. And, you know, essentially since, you know, to this day, since, since, you know, February, March, 2020, it's been imbalance in outta whack since that time period. So one of the things that, um, ended up positively is both, you know, both the products themselves were very scarce in that kind of mid 20, 20 period, but also the ability to ship them and transport them from where they're getting manufactured in factories, you know, oftentimes overseas to the us, to Europe, to the markets that they were getting sold into. So, you know, as I mentioned, we have a service for suppliers called CastleGate where we are able to do that chipping for them.
We, uh, had, you know, you can call it foresight, you can call it luck to, uh, be able to obtain a, you know, a substantial amount of volume at rates that were market rates of time. But very quickly, you know, turned into, you know, a quarter of what going rates and market rates were. So we're able to offer that to our suppliers, to help them get their products into markets and sell them. Um, we focus a lot on how do we help consumers choose among, uh, alternative. So if you're going and you're shopping for a desk, you might see a desk that you fall in love with. It might not be available or it might take, you know, weeks to get to you and you might need one now. So, you know, what are similar other desks that we can, we can find for you or offer for you?
And actually one of the investments that we make, um, quite a bit of, uh, of our focus is actually machine learning and AI. So one of those, one of the applications is the substitute ability where one of the intriguing ones was, um, kind of, you know, we talked about furniture, we talked about desks, we talked about a lot of things that were in high demand. And in that summer 20, 21 other area that was, uh, you know, kind of interesting was, uh, kids' play sets, uh, kind of swing sets, uh, bouncy houses, all, you know, all, all of those things. And what ended up being kind of an interesting observation is that the, the algorithms and the systems that we built discover, you know, figured out probably faster than we would have, that it was, you know, customers, weren't buying swing sets and they weren't buying bouncy houses.
They were buying something to keep my kids busy so that they're not bouncing off the walls in the house when they're not able to go out and do things and play with their friends. So, you know, ended up being, um, you know, very divergent types of categories that were getting recommended and solving consumer problems. So kind of alongside helping suppliers get their products to the markets they're selling in alongside kind of continuing to provide as much real time data as we can from the platform to suppliers to help them plan their businesses. There's also an element around how do we help consumers find something and, and purchase something that's gonna meet their needs, even if it might not be that item that they were first shopping for.
Melissa:
Some of this probably involves working with other departments too. Right. I can see having to really be in touch with customer support around this or, or other people who are handling customers very closely. How did you kind of orchestrate, um, you know, making sure that they were involved in the things that they were hearing coming from customers during this time were, were getting back to your team and, uh, keeping them in the loop.
John:
We focus a lot and prioritize, making sure that teams are talking to their users, whether it's customer suppliers or internal users for the customer side, we have a research team that we've built out that brings customers in on site. Um, you can also, now we're doing that remotely. We have, um, channels that if you've ever bought something on Wayfair, we, you know, reach out to you and ask you, how did we do, did we deliver it well? Did you find what you're looking for? Um, you know, can we follow up and talk to you more? So I think that's kind of second channel. We work a lot with the departments that talk with the user. So for customers, that's customer support on the supplier side, we have fairly lovely large organizations that partner with and, and work with suppliers, things like category management, merchandisers, merchants, uh, partner operations, kind of fulfillment operations roles.
So in all of those cases, making sure that we are regularly talking to them, that we have ways for them to reach out to product teams doing that at scale, because you can also imagine that kind of getting peppered by, you know, dozens of random one off requests is less useful. So we've kind of created policies and processes that those teams can reach out. We can reach out to them and not kind of collaborate each other's attention. Um, and then finally we have a ton of data where just the product is so well instrumented that, you know, we can see what were customers searching for. Did they find what they're searching for? Did they click on something on the first page? Did they have to keep searching over and over and, and not find it? So all of those become signals on how, how well did we, or didn't we meet an expectation?
Melissa:
Yeah, that sounds like incredibly important, making sure, especially in tough times too, that everybody's so, you know, on the same page and working together, um, when you look back to on this whole, you know, COVID experience, you know, working at a company that was impacted for, I think all companies were, but Wayfair was particularly an interesting place to be. Um, what are like your biggest takeaways, uh, around like, you know, maybe, maybe what were the biggest struggles that you, um, you faced as a product leader in this situation? And then, um, how did you overcome them and move forward?
John:
Some of the struggles were situational. I think, um, I think we were all learning and trying to figure out how does working from home, working from your basement, working from your kitchen table, actually feel. And the answer is, uh, really tiring when you're on Google meter resume all day long. So, um, I think one thing we struggled was, was burnout that, you know, 2, 3, 4 months in we, we were all working from home. We were dealing with, um, volumes essentially, and order a magnitude higher than Wayfair had ever managed. And, uh, and we were also dealing with personal stress though. Our kids, uh, you know, personally, our kids were, uh, not in preschool. Um, they, their, their preschool sent them home. And as you can imagine, preschool over zoom, uh, is not the most effective way to occupy, uh, kind of then, uh, then to, and then four year old.
So, um, I think, you know, that experience that I was having with my family was mirrored across the, you know, the broad team of, of folks that we were working with. So I think trying to understand how do we balance life with, with work was one big, early struggle. We ended up having instituting recess hour, where from 12 to one, 12 to one 30, we kind of blocked calendars across the team and said, let's do our best not to have meetings during this time to give people a chance to unplug, whether it's to go outside, just even get food, cuz finding lunch in your house is a, you know, was a new challenge for, for all of us sometimes, um, created, uh, what we called reset days or opportunities to just kinda unplug as an organization and, and try to, to do decompress. I think that was, that was probably the biggest early challenge.
I think in parallel, we've talked about this quite a bit, but kind of figuring out the dynamics of how do you interact with teams? How do you meet new people? How do you build trust in a virtual environment where, um, you know, a lot of our playbooks find included. I, I ended up switching roles from leading the teams on the storefront customer side and moving over to kind of now coming over and leading our global supplier experience. I did that while we were all fully remote and my normal go-to of getting to know people, building trust, establishing relationships was very much in person driven, which was largely around, you know, let's get coffee, let's get lunch, let's get to know each other. And I had to figure out how to do that with a whole new set of partners and, and people to work with while not being able to do any of that and having to interact virtually.
Melissa:
Yeah. What were your, is to build trust in a, uh, virtual environment? Like how would you do it when you got,
John:
I found that it actually mirrored quite a bit of, um, of how you would do it in person and video helps a lot. So it's, um, it's probably an order to order a magnitude better of being able to have a video conversation or a video chat, uh, not too much back to that zoom fatigue kind of, uh, issue, but you know, for, for the right conversations, um, being able to see someone else. Sure. There's a little bit of a delay. Sure. There're either a tiny icon on your screen or a massive kind of face on, on your screen depending on how zoomed in you are. But, um, that, that kind of interpersonal connection, even if through a computer screen was really valuable. And then I think at the end of the day, it came down to what, you know, what are you saying? What are you doing?
Meaning are you saying the things that, um, are reinforcing what the, the company values with the team values are in Wayfair's case, it was around putting our customers first, putting our suppliers first solving for. And then more importantly, are your, do your actions mirror that, do you, you know, do the things that you do, do the things that you are, um, driving and encouraging your team to do near what you're saying, because you know, the, the best way to lose trust and lose credibility is, you know, to not fulfill on the, the words that you're saying and not fulfill on the promises that you're making. So it ended up being in many ways, very similar to how we would do it in person though. Um, a very, uh, different experience.
Melissa:
I think that's really good advice. Um, you know, thinking about it too, it, it does mirror, right? Um, virtually in person, it sucks that she can't just like take a walk to go get coffee, but I find that a lot of people too, just get on the, on the zoom call or whatever call and they just dive in. It's like, let's get down to business. I don't wanna be here anymore, but taking that time to really like connect with somebody, understand a little bit more about them. Um, you know, I'm sure that really helps, especially when you're in new roles and kicking it off. So thanks for sharing that with us. Wow. Um, Wayfair too, is in an interesting position now that I wanted to kind of close out with and talk about too, you know, you thrived during the pandemic, like a lot of businesses didn't so you had the, the great benefit of like, wow, we're killing it here, you know, record sales. Um, but now coming out of the pandemic when everybody's leaving their houses, how are you thinking about that going forward? Um, and what does business as usual look like at Wayfair? You know, now that we're coming out of this whole thing?
John:
Yeah, I would, I would say we're probably, uh, a couple years away from business as usual. just in, uh, as, as a world, but, uh, but especially at Wayfair, because the, um, sort of shifts that I kind of describe happening early in 2020 are in many ways reversing. Now people are going to physical stores where either before they were closed or they were lot less attractive to go spend time at, um, people are traveling, you know, there's a, there's a pent of demand of getting out of your house and, uh, and going and having experiences that you weren't able to have over the last couple years. So I think those have all, uh, certainly been a headwind to the, the business, uh, from a wafer perspective. But, um, we also have, um, the luxury of having a very long term perspective. We're still founder led and found, you know, founder operated and founder led and, um, you know, Steven ne their, their time horizon is decades, not, not months or years.
So the broad way that we look at it is are we creating happy customers? And one, one measure of that is do they come back? Meaning, do you know if you bought something on Wayfair, how likely are you to come back? The flip side of it is of all purchases, what purchases come from, repeat customers, meaning it, wasn't your first purchase on Wayfair. And as you can imagine, as, you know, as, as the company grows and, and serves many, you know, more and more customers, you could imagine that that would decrease over time. And with Wayfair, that's actually held very constant and increased in most, in many cases. So for us, it's largely been around, can we offer customers the very best experience for shopping for their home online? And if we do that over and over and over and focus on making it even better, then, um, that kind of becomes our north star in our guiding light.
That really focuses a lot of how teams look at their priorities, how we look at the near term and the, the long term horizon, and kinda look at a period like this, where the, um, you know, the demand is, is slowing down as a, as an opportunity to continue to invest in our customers. And actually, you know, the Wayfair model works particularly well in this environment because our suppliers are now sitting on more inventory than is not moving as quickly as they might have predicted. So that means that they are, um, eager to kind of turn that inventory into cash. They're more open to offering discounts to our customers. So it creates a better customer experience. We provide a platform where they can do that kind of conversion of, of inventory into cash and help them kind of reinvest into their next wave of inventory. And then similarly, as we think about things like advertising, things like transportation, the broad costs that Wayfair has to expend go down as well. So it allows us to kind of take some of those savings and reinvest that back into, um, product experiences back into automating things that might have been very manual during the, the surge. And, uh, you know, we realize that, wait, I guess this is one of those things that is breaking or broke. So let's, uh, let's go kind of build it for, for that next order.
Melissa:
That's great. The one thing that I'm really taking away from your whole story here, too, you've mentioned it several times, so I just kind wanna call it out is, you know, you, you really talk about, uh, three horizon model of strategy. You also talk about like the founders and leadership being on time horizons that are really far out. So you're not like micromanaging the teams, you're focusing on problems here. And, um, you know, the story that you just told really kind of shines about how making a strategy like that, making something that's long lasting and long term and looking forward and evaluating that, and not, not so detail oriented where we're committing to the CEO, like every little tiny feature, um, it really sounds like that helped you, you know, thrive in uncertainty, um, that we were facing with this pandemic, but, you know, it was ingrained in your culture even before this.
John:
I, I think that's right. Um, you know, I, I, I think it's a, that's a good way to kind of capture it and, and summarize it one way we talk about it is that you really wanna balance the, the long term, the short term. And what I mean by that is if you're talking about like a two year delivery project, then you know, all of a sudden you're back to waterfall, you're back to project planning and that's not a fun spot to be in on the other hand, if you're kind of Del, you know, only thinking about the next two weeks and doing sprint after sprint, after sprint, you're unlikely to end up at a good destination or, uh, somewhere that is radically better or different than when you started you'll, you'll generally have kind of iterative improvement or optimize a metric. So what we strive to do is that we strive to set out what is that three year, five year, 10 year ideal state from a user perspective, what does awesome look like unconstrained by today's realities?
Then we pair that with very iterative building, very kind of twice a year planning process, two week sprints, quarterly OKRs, uh, kind of by quarter check-in. So kinda like all of the different mechanics of how do we create hypotheses, how do we test hypotheses? How do we do delivery on very rapid and iterative ways and kind of pairing those two really helps avoid some of the pitfalls of either the, either of the approaches, because it ensures that we have a long term perspective in mind of where we're trying to get and where we're trying to build out the platform to, but it also means that we are, uh, striving to always learn striving to, uh, release quickly and not have, uh, extremely long duration projects.
Melissa:
Um, definitely something I think a lot of teams could learn from, from you that that's a great balance, I think, going forward. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast, John, and sharing your story with us. Um, where can people learn more about you?
John:
Yeah. Uh, I'm on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/n/john Shapiro. Uh, so, you know, I'm happy to, to chat there also on Twitter at John R chat, J O H N R S H P.
Melissa:
Great. Well, thank you so much. And, uh, thank you listeners for joining us on this series about, uh, pivots and product during COVID, which has been really enlightening. Uh, next week, we're gonna have our dear Melissa episode cap it off and answer your questions about everything that has to do with pivoting in COVID. So thanks very much, and we'll see you next time.